The Five Stages of Feature Flag Adoption

The Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) explains how people adopt new technology based on perceived usefulness and ease of use. Adopting feature flags can be challenging due to inertia, but a common pattern for successful adoption includes stages such as recognition, boolean era, great configuration, expansion, and experimentation. In the recognition stage, teams realize that their current branching strategy is unmanageable and start looking into concepts like trunk-based development. The boolean era involves changing workflows to accommodate feature flags, while the great configuration stage sees teams moving beyond simple toggles to multivariate flags and advanced targeting. In the expansion stage, feature management becomes a cross-functional practice, and in the experimentation stage, teams use feature flags for server-side experimentation to validate hypotheses with data. Taking time and not rushing the process is crucial for successful adoption of feature flags.